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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Commentary on Joannides

I want to offer a suggestion on Jefferson Morley's struggle to get records on Joannides from the CIA. First of all, of course, I want to thank Jefferson Morley for the fight he's waging. Thank you! Mr. Morley is to be further applauded for keeping up the fight year after year as the CIA continues to stonewall. I have not read any of the legal briefs of the case. I have only followed this in news reports and what I hear from the research community. What I want to put forward, (and maybe this has been done already) is that we put together an extensively detailed narrative that demonstrates exactly how Joannides hampered the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, by not only concealing his past with the CIA, with anti-Castro Cubans, with the DRE, but how as the HSCA liaison to the CIA he was in a unique position to deny access to records and access to personnel. This narrative should show when he was hired to be the liaison between the CIA and HSCA, exactly what he did, day by day, issue by issue, each and every request for documents, access to CIA personnel, requests for testimony from the CIA, etc. Once something like this is done then we can reduce it to bullet points for the media. I do think such a narrative may strengthen the case as to exactly why records about him should be released.

It is essential to such a narrative to have the input of HSCA staff members. I would assume Mr. Morley has some affidavits from some HSCA members. We may also be able to prove the key points of the narrative with records already released under the JFK Act. We can add that no one at the ARRB knew of Mr Joannides background either, and withholding that information negatively impacted the work of the ARRB. Certainly, the ARRB would have investigated Mr. Joannides and requested all the information they could get about him from the CIA.

Currently, if you enter the name "Joannides," in the search field for the JFK Records Collection database you only get 16 hits. None of these records are the ones Mr. Morley is seeking. But, there must be more than this.

1.) 104-10118-10196 - Open in Full
2.) 104-10304-10000 - Released with deletions
3.) 104-10145-10440 - Open in Full
4.) 104-10147-10363 - Open in Full
5.) 104-10135-10116 - Open in Full
6.) 104-10135-10022 - Open in Full
7.) 104-10143-10136 - Open in Full
8.) 104-10125-10238 - Open in Full
9.) 104-10125-10230 - Open in Full
10.) 104-10145-10431 - Released with Deletions
11.) 104-10125-10242 - Open in Full
12.) 180-10075-10130 - Open in Full
13.) 180-10107-10057 - Open in Full
14.) 180-10075-10129 - Open in Full
15.) 180-10075-10212 - Open in Full
16.) 180-10107-10050 - Open in Full

If anyone out there can supply me with any pertinent information along this line I will try to create just such a narrative. I would ask that you be specific and have something to document your information, by that I mean RIF numbers, agency file numbers, scans of documents, summaries of documents. Thank you.